WordPress MU

My apologies for the length of this post.

I am in the process of preparing to upgrade WPMU from 1.2.1 to 1.2.5. Step 7 in the documentation explains that while you need to delete the old WP files before uploading the new ones, there are exceptions - such as wp-config.php, wp-content, etc - that need to be left in place. It then says to upload the new files. I just want to make sure that I do this correctly, so here's my question. Once I've deleted the all old files except for the few that they say to leave, do I then upload ALL the new files, or all of them except those files (wp-config.php, wp-content, etc) that I've left in place?

I appreciate your feedback.

Here is the way I do an upgrade...works for me, but use at your own risk :-)

1. I don't delete any files. I create a new directory named something like oldsitebackup. Then I move all the existing files and directories into the oldsitebackup directory with the exception of the following:

1. Leave everything in wp-content in place except for blogs.php and index.php. I create a subdirectory in oldsitebackup called wp-content and then move those two files there. Also, if you are upgrading to 1.2.5, then delete (or move) the default plugins from your existing mu-plugings directory.
2. Leave wp-config.php and .htaccess in place (and leave favicon.ico if you created a custom favicon).

Move all other files to oldsitebackup. This will result in an in-place backup of all your source files.

Then upload the files from your upgrade with the exception of the following.

1. Don't upload the new wp-content directory, but do upload the blogs.php and index.php files that you moved out of your existing wp-content directory.
2. Upload all other directories and files with the exception of the ones you left in place.
3. If you have done any hacks to the core files (which I have done a lot), then apply them to the new files if needed.

Now you have your new files and directories in place and you can complete the upgrade process.

Be sure to back up your database before doing any upgrade, so you will be able to recover if you run into problems.

Steve

Steve,

Thanks so much for the feedback. Just curious; why do you move blogs.php and index.php if you are replacing them with new ones anyway? Is that for backup purposes?

Thanks again.

Yep. Just in case the files hose up, you have a complete backup of anything new you upload.

I move blogs.php and index.php just in-case they were updated in the new release. If you were to do a diff on those files and see that there were no updates to them, then there would be no reason to replace them.

Steve

Your method worked perfectly! I had only one error after uploading, which was:

"Fatal error: Cannot redeclare switcher_scripts()..."

But I found the solution in the forums, which was to delete the plug-ins in /content/mu-plugins.

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=6192&page&replies=3

I'm hoping Fantastico comes up with an install/upgrade front-end for MU that's as slick as their stand-alone. It'd be great to do this from cPanel.

Thanks again. Only 15 minutes down-time!

Glad to see you worked it out.

I seriously doubt fantastico will ever have an install script for MU.

Why?

a) cPanel is targeted for shared hosts.
b) MU tends to violate the TOS of most shared hosts in one way or another.
c) MU is server level software, and can easily cause trouble on a shared host.

I could go on, but that's enough to give reason to it.

I agree - mostly on the grounds of the virtual subdomains. Fantastico can't do that part for ya.